2016 books: 22-26

[the_siobhan]

    

Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor This is a YA book that BC loaned me. I always think "teenager" when I hear Young Adult, but I would put the target age of this book a little lower. It's a really lovely story. The main character is a young girl who is born with usual abilities and who is shunned and bullied by her peers. A typical coming of age story, but the writer weaves a gorgeous background of a village where almost everything is grown from plants, including computers and buildings. The writing is simple but lyrical and the story is a charming adventure quest.

    

A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
misslynx and rosefox recommended this author in my Give Me All The Books post.

A Stranger in Olondria tells the story of a man who has a needy ghost attach itself to him at a time when claiming to be able to communicate with spirits is a punishable heresy. His affliction ends up getting him arrested and puts him in the middle of a brewing rebellion.

The Winged Histories takes place during and after the fighting. Various events are described by different women, each of whom have a stake in the outcome. It has less of a linear plot than A Stranger in Olondria; being written more as a series of vignettes.

Samatar's writing is more formal in style than the other books on this list. There is minimal dialogue, instead relying on impressions created by layers of descriptions. She manages to create an incredible sense of atmosphere - her descriptions of scents, sounds and light drag you right into the atmosphere of the story. And the text is gorgeous. Check this out:

The heavens turned. A dark blue glow came to dwell on the windowsill. Slowly, the shapes in the room emerged from the dark as if rising from the sea.

Can you believe this shit? I would have written, "at last the sun rose" or something equally lamentable. This is beautiful.

    

Starship Blackbeard by Michael Wallace I got this as a free sample from Amazon, to promote a collection called Rogues which in turn is a promotion of a bunch of authors who write Space Opera by bundling the first book from each series. First of all I would just like to say that I think the term "Space Opera" is glorious and I want to thank the human who came up with it. Second of all, I was surprised how much I liked this story. The setting is a universe in which colonial England expanded into space. Society is strictly divided on class lines, and the strategies that led to things like the opium trade are still well in use. The main character is a Captain in the Royal Navy who is descended from some minor Baron and who probably would have had a nice tidy military career except that he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and his superiors decide he would be a convenient person to frame for some covert ops cover-up. The writing is decent and the world-building is engaging. I didn't find any of the characters particularly likable, but they were all interesting and I wanted to find out what happened next.

    

Feyland: The Dark Realm by Anthea Sharp Another freebie, obviously. This takes place in the near future, where people can play fully immersive video games called "sims". The lead character is a girl who plays what she thinks is a sim called Feyland, which turns out to contain a portal into the actual Fae realm. Bad shit happens. She seeks out an ally, a guy who initially hates her because of the class war but who is won over to her cause because access to actual real-life mage battles, holy shit. I guess this is a YA book that targets the teen demographic, since the characters are all in High School. It's actually quite well written. Nothing original here, but it does what it says on the tin and it does it fairly well.

So I've noticed a couple of things about these self-published writers:

They all have "best-selling" somewhere on their website/amazon bio.

The elves-and-vampires fantasy is written by people with female pen names and the space fantasy is written by people with male pen names.

Neither of those things should really have surprised me.